Artifact-Based Rendering Engine

The purpose of the Artifact-Based Rendering Engine (ABR Engine) is to provide artists with tools and techniques to create high-fidelity visualizations of multivariate spatiotemporal data using their own traditional-media creations, such as:

Colormaps inspired by nature

Linear brown to white colormap

Sketched / inked lines

Angled / semi-straight line

Textures gathered from the real world

Desert sand texture

Hand-sculpted clay glyphs

Clay rice point glyph

With ABR as a tool in their studio, artists have created images like the following:

Gulf of Mexico biogeochemistry visualization created by artist Stephanie Zeller Gulf of Mexico biogeochemistry visualization created by artist Stephanie Zeller

Ocean currents underneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in the antarctic Ocean currents underneath the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in the antarctic by artist Francesca Samsel

The ABR Engine was created and is maintained by the Sculpting Visualizations Collective.

Getting Started with ABR

ABR can be used as both a programming-free visualization design tool (i.e., ABR Compose mode), and as a standalone visualization package in Unity (i.e., C# mode). Before getting into specifics of either of these modes, it is important to understand a few concepts about ABR. Give each of these core concepts a read through before diving into creating with ABR:

  1. Key Data
  2. VisAssets
  3. Data Impressions
  4. Basic Terminology
  5. Media Folder

Next steps

  1. Follow along with the ABR Vis App tutorial to set up ABR to create your first visualization. This tutorial introduces ABR Compose mode.

  2. Follow along with the ABR C# Introduction tutorial to set up ABR with C#. This tutorial introduces scripting with ABR, which enables you to develop deeply customized and interactive applications with ABR.